The India Pictures

A good friend traveled to India over a year ago. She took her small pocket Olympus camera to record the adventure. Near the end of the trip she lost the camera and all her pictures on public transportation in one of India 's teaming cities. Through a succession of almost unbelievable occurrences her camera and its precious pictures were found and returned to her. If I had not seen the camera in her hand, I would not have believed it.

My first comment to her was, “Have you saved the pictures?” “No,” she said, but she promised she would soon. She carried the camera and the pictures around in her purse for over a year, but never downloaded the pictures from the camera or backed them up.

Now she was soon to leave for Far East again and asked me to take the pictures off the camera and put them on her brand new laptop. Knowing the history of the pictures, I was very careful to do it right the first time. I created a new folder on her laptop and put the camera memory card in my card reader, attached to her laptop.

I told her the safest and fastest way to download pictures off a camera is to put the memory card in a card reader or a memory card slot on your computer, and then drag and drop them into a folder. This bypasses all the camera and computer software since it is a simple transfer between drives.

I was most careful to right click the mouse and select “Copy” and not “Move”, this way if something went wrong the pictures would still be on the memory card. Never erase the card until you are sure the actual pictures are on your computer, not just the thumbnails or a shortcut. As she sat beside me, that is exactly what I did.

The next thing we knew the pictures were GONE. Of the 255 pictures, there were 10 thumbnail images and the rest were blank files. Every effort to read the pictures on the computer failed. When we put the memory card back in the camera, our only option was to “Format Card.” The memory chip had failed.

The sense of loss was palpable. I was sure I had done something wrong, but what? I insisted that she not use the card again and buy a new one for this trip. As she left I promised to do what I could to get her pictures back.

Since she took the memory chip with her, all I had to work with were the corrupted files on her laptop. With the help of some very knowledgeable friends and Google, I got to work. I began by downloading JPG recovery programs. There are many and they can be expensive, but as with most software of this kind, a trial version is usually available. One finally worked, and I was able to recover over 200 of the pictures.

What had occurred was a corruption of the “header” on each file. With the right software the header can be reconstructed and the image data reassembled. It did not work for all of them; in some cases the data itself was lost.

When she returns, I will try to actually recover the image files on the memory card itself. Again with the right software it should be possible.

I was amazed to find what a common problem this is. I knew that you could recover accidentally erased files on a computer drive. In that case all that is actually erased is the file name. Simple software allows you to rename the files as long as they have not been overwritten. Files that have been corrupted by a failing mechanical drive or by a failed memory chip are more difficult to retrieve but as in this case, recovery is possible with the right software.

One of the many lessons to be learned from this experience is not to give up and assume nothing can be done. Depending on the value of the lost data, there are often many ways to retrieve it. Many companies provide data recovery services for industry and individuals. Many of these companies specialize in recovering data from failed or damaged hard drives. And as I found out there is quite an extensive library of data recovery software available to the individual, if you are willing to pay the price.

Of course the main lesson to be learned from this episode is that a PURSE is not a good backup device.